Stories

JetBrains RubyMine is an IDE for productive Ruby and Rails development. It offers an intelligent editor with smart code completion and refactoring tools, an integrated graphical debugger, a version control integration, and outstanding web development facilities. On top of that, the recent 2.0 release brings new refactorings, improved Cucumber integration and Shoulda support, Ruby 1.9, and Rails i18n assistance. Try RubyMine at jetbrains.com and use the "Ruby5" coupon code to get $10 off.

The CodeRack contest is just about over and the judges have narrowed down the finalists to just ten entries. From GeoIP Country to LiveStats to a RedisRequestLimiter, there are a lot of interesting, and useful, middlewares. Head over to CodeRack to take a look and cast your vote, now.

The "Ruby Standardization Working Group" has been established in Japan to define the one, official, internationally recognized Ruby specification. Based on Ruby 1.8.7, a first draft has already come together and they're looking for comments and review. Ultimately, the standard will be presented to the International Standardization Organization to become an International Standard, allowing - among other things - Ruby to be officially used by the Japanese government. As an added bonus, it will most likely become much easier for developers to create their own Ruby interpreters, as well, as they will no longer be chasing a moving target.

A while back, the team at InfoEther put together an incredibly thorough white paper on Ruby and Rails. At about 40 pages, it includes a history of Ruby and Rails, the community, licensing information, frameworks, support, and much more. It's an indispensable resource if your clients, team, or organization may be questioning using Ruby in their next application and is something that should probably be read by every developer who calls themselves a Ruby or Rails programmer.

At RubyConf 2009, Nathaniel Talbot spoke about Experiment Driven Development; basically, testing your business ideas to drive development. Further, Assaf Arkin has created a Rails plugin called Vanity which aims to make EDD really easy to do.

Also at RubyConf 2009, Steven Haddox talked to us about an application that he's been working on called Tweetie_flickr and Twettie 2. With Tweetie 2, he shows how to using Flickr to store Twitter images and post those URLs in your tweets. The source is available for the application on GitHub and a running demo can be found at Flickr4Twitter.com.

Previous Episodes

Tile, Rango, and Flotomatic are all covered in today's episode. We also have some version string tools and a recap of RubyConf. Then we rock out to a song about the mountain of woes that is developing for IE.

Recorded at SFO - the San Francisco International Airport - we recap some of the RubyConf 2009 presentations and even get a chance to talk directly with Nick Quaranto, Bryan Helmkamp, Tom Preston Warner, and Ilya Grigorik about their talks.

This week we look at a new authorization plugin from Ryan Bates, and the latest releases of MacRuby and YARD. Also ruby-gmail, the SimpleDB DataMapper adapter, and using mod_rewrite to serve maintenance pages.